Storage Area Networks (SANs) reliably store large amounts of data for an organization. Clusters of storage devices, e.g., FC storage arrays and servers, in one location are called SAN islands and communicate using the FC Protocol. Users accessing a SAN typically reside on an Ethernet based Local Area Network (LAN) at another location that may be coupled to an FC server cluster for communication with the FC storage array. To mediate communication between the FC server cluster and the FC storage array, an FC switch network (also called “switched fabric”) is employed.
With the advent of virtualization and cloud computing, an ever growing number of virtual machines (VMs) are employed in the network to provide not only end user application services, but growing amounts of provider services such as firewalls, acceleration and compression services, among others. As the number of network devices grows, whether hardware or virtual, the management and control planes do not scale easily either with the growth or with each other. These scaling issues create operational challenges that can benefit from newer approaches to the management and control plane database management.